Official documents infer
that British secret services and/or their proxies will commit terrorism and
blame it on enemies in order to justify rapid military deployments. With the
latest bombing of Iraq under way, the UK needs a ‘strategy of tension’ to convince
the public that war is necessary.

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

The term ‘strategy of
tension’ comes from Gladio, a Europe-wide operation run by MI6 and the CIA,
which began at the close of WWII and continued into the early-1990s. The
purpose of Gladio was to train stay-behind networks to battle Soviet expansion
across Europe. Another aim was to terrorise the populations of the continent,
as well as Turkey, into accepting the rule of neo-fascist governments.
CIA-MI6-trained Gladio networks were responsible for many atrocities, including
the 1980 Bologna train station bombing.[1]

Bologna, 1980.

During the Troubles in
North Ireland, Britain sought to justify its brutal occupation by demonising
the Irish. One of the methods was to guide Irish Republican Army terrorism.
Whistleblowers reveal that high-level Provisionals included double-agents John
Joe Magee and Freddie Scappaticci. So-called Real IRA double-agents included
Kevin Fulton.[2]

Irish Republican Army.

According to former FBI
translator Sibel Edmonds, the Pentagon is running Gladio B, focusing on Muslims
in Central Asia and the Middle East. ‘In the late 1990s, all the way up to
9/11, [Bin Laden’s second-in-command Ayman] al-Zawahiri and other mujahideen
operatives were meeting regularly with senior U.S. officials in the U.S.
embassy in Baku to plan the Pentagon’s Balkan operations with the mujahideen’—terrorists
armed and trained by Britain and America in the late-1970s to late-1980s. ‘We
had support for these operations from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but the U.S.
oversaw and directed them. They were being run from a secret section of the Pentagon
with its own office’, says Edmonds.[3]

COUNTER-TERRORISM AS A
PRETEXT FOR OCCUPATION

A British Ministry of
Defence document titled The Future Character of Conflict explains that ‘All
warfare requires the political support and consensus of the people in whose
name it is waged … The use of military instruments will only be viable once
events have been correctly attributed through objective evidence, providing a
strong basis in public support and taking that case to Parliament’—sometimes
after the Royal Air Force has started bombing, as in the case of Libya.

The ‘objective evidence’
might include soldiers allegedly killed on the streets of Britain by Muslims,
or British aid workers allegedly kidnapped by Islamic extremists in Iraq.
Chillingly, the document continues:

‘Delays in
decision making will impact operational tempo, putting a premium on more agile
decision-making structures and processes, both nationally and within the
alliance: these processes must be routinely exercised if only to demonstrate
resolve. However, public attitude to legitimacy could be changed by an event –
such as a Mumbai-style atrocity – designed to provoke a reaction’.[4]

The inference is
that terrorist outrages could be staged, a la Gladio, to elicit public support
for more war. Indeed, the so-called security services are already claiming to
have foiled a London-based terror plot linked to the Islamic State of Iraq in
the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS and IS).[5]

Mumbai, 2008.

The Mumbai example given
by the UK MoD is particularly interesting, given that the atrocity was carried
out by the CIA. David Headley, the man blamed for the attack, ‘was acting as a
“highly prized counterterrorism asset” for America, according to former
officers in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, who said his covert career had run
for 11 years’.[6]

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